Radiation exposure victims fight for compensation as nuclear weapons funding soars

Nine months have passed since the law that compensates US victims of radiation exposure expired in June, and yet another opportunity to reinstate it fell to the wayside last week.

The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA), enacted in 1990, provided pay-outs to people unwittingly exposed to radioactive substances from the Manhattan Project and Cold War efforts. For decades, people living downwind from the Nevada Test Site, nuclear weapons site workers and uranium miners relied on the money they received from RECA to pay their medical bills for rare cancers and diseases contracted from their radiation exposure.

But even so, activist groups across the US homeland and territories argue that the law was woefully inadequate. “When you talk about nuclear justice, we have not had it. We haven’t seen it,” Mary Dickson, a Utah downwinder and thyroid cancer survivor, said in a recent interview.

After the House shot down an attempt to push an expanded version of the compensation act through Congress last year, a bipartisan group of senators reintroduced a RECA reauthorization and expansion bill in January. The effort is led by Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Democratic Sen. Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico, who recently spoke on the proposed bill in an interview with the Bulletin.

“This is not a partisan issue,” Luján said. “This is for the American people, and especially those who live downwind of this testing and those uranium mine workers who are sacrificing their lives and their careers for national security purposes.”

The hope was to slip the amended act into the Trump Administration’s first stopgap budget bill, due no later than the end-of-day last Friday to avoid a government shutdown. But that hope evaporated when instead of proposing an omnibus bill overhauling previous budget priorities—as was expected of the new administration—the House introduced a continuing resolution that largely carried on Biden administration funding levels without mention of the new RECA bill. The continuing resolution does, however, increase defense budget spending by $6 billion.

The budget bill passed through Congress on Friday, closing the door on RECA reauthorization indefinitely and leaving radiation exposure victims behind yet again.

“We have to have RECA,” Karen Nickel, a nuclear waste exposure victim and activist from Missouri, told the Bulletin. “We have to. It is the only thing that will help our community with any chance or hope of surviving us.”

Some of the voices behind the fight. From 1990 until July 2024, RECA paid over $2.6 billion in benefits to more than 41,000 claimants. But the law covered only residents from certain counties in Utah, Nevada, and Arizona considered to have received the most fallout from nearly 1,000 continental US nuclear bomb tests. In 2023, Princeton University researcher Sébastien Philippe showed that radioactive fallout from the 1945 Trinity test alone reached 46 states, Canada, and Mexico, proving what many American victims of radiation exposure already knew: The effects of the United States’ early nuclear weapons projects reached far further than ever acknowledged by the US government.

The proposed RECA reauthorization bill would extend coverage to Americans affected by the Trinity nuclear test in areas of Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Colorado, the Navajo Nation and all of Nevada. It would also extend the downwinders list to those in Guam exposed to fallout from the Pacific nuclear tests.

Since RECA’s expiration, no new applicants have been accepted. Now, a coalition of activists for nuclear justice is fighting to reinstate the law and expand its coverage.

Frontline activist groups from Missouri, New Mexico, Texas, Utah, Arizona, Idaho, the Navajo Nation, and Guam have been advocating independently of one another for decades. They have now come together under a RECA working group organized by the Union of Concerned Scientists to share information, strategies, and resources to accomplish their shared goal of bigger and better RECA coverage.

The RECA working group has helped connect activists from affected areas previously siloed from each other.

For over four decades, Dickson has independently advocated for expanded recognition of nuclear exposure in Utah. Hailing from Salt Lake City, she developed thyroid cancer in her 20s and underwent a complete thyroidectomy to remove the cancerous gland. She attributed her illness to her exposure to radioactive iodine in nuclear fallout from bomb tests, which she also believes caused her infertility.

“Nothing makes you an activist faster than a diagnosis,” Dickson said.

Despite what she believes are radiation-induced health issues, Dickson was not considered a downwinder under the expired RECA and was never eligible for compensation. Ten counties in Utah were previously covered by RECA, but not Salt Lake County, where Dickson lives.

Cullin Patillo tells a similar story. His father and aunt lived in Mohave County, Arizona, which was not included in the five Arizona counties covered by RECA despite its proximity to the Nevada test site. Both died from rare cancers.

“No one recognizes what they did to him,” Patillo said. “It’s high time they’ve been recognized and compensated.”

Under the expanded RECA, Patillo’s father and aunt would have been owed $100,000 for their downwinder status—an increase from the original compensation act’s $50,000 downwinder award. Patillo said $100,000 is a drop in the bucket of what his father and aunt spent over the years to get medical treatment. Now that they are gone, the award would pass to Patillo’s mother and his cousin.

Residents of Guam would also be eligible for compensation under the new RECA.

Robert Celeste was a US military veteran from Guam and one of many servicemen sent to clean up the contaminated Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands, where 67 nuclear bombs were detonated between 1946 and 1958. In 1994, Celeste uncovered declassified documents from the Manhattan Project era that proved Guam sustained significant exposure from the fallout of the Pacific Proving Grounds tests some 2,000 kilometers east. He testified before Congress in March 2004, referencing statements in the declassified documents from retired Navy Lt. Bert Schreiber, who testified that “the Geiger counters were off scale” in November 1952.

In 2004, Congress concluded that Guam “did receive measurable fallout” from the Pacific tests and should be eligible for downwinder coverage under RECA, as well as special coverage for those involved in decontaminating US naval ships sent to Guam from the Marshall Islands for cleaning. Over 20 years later, Celeste is still fighting for that finding to be enacted into US law.

RECA and nuclear waste. Areas of Missouri, Alaska, and Kentucky would also be covered for the first time under the RECA expansion bill for a different and long-overlooked kind of exposure—not to nuclear fallout, but to nuclear waste.

Karen Nickel and Dawn Chapman, co-founders of Just Moms STL, grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, unknowingly surrounded by radioactive contamination. During the race to build the first atomic bomb, downtown St. Louis was home to a uranium enrichment plant owned by the company formerly known as Mallinckrodt Chemical Works, now Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals. The plant was used to produce weapons-grade uranium for the Manhattan Project. For decades radioactive byproducts from this processing site were improperly stored in residential areas north of St. Louis and residents are still battling the issue to this day.

Nickel describes an almost-cartoonish scene in St. Louis: Nuclear waste in decaying steel drums piled up at the city’s airport and spilled along the road and in people’s backyards—left unprotected and exposed to rain and weather for decades and leaking radioactive waste into the local Coldwater Creek that families and children live by and play in. Radioactive materials were also dumped at the nearby West Lake Landfill, which now sits next to an underground fire from decomposing organic waste that threatens to get into contact with the material and spread radioactive particles across nearby communities.

Remediation efforts have been ongoing for two decades but have been unsuccessful as far as Nickel is concerned. She described a baseball field she played on as a child still surrounded by a “radioactive fence.” The contamination in the creek has not been cleaned up at all, save for the area around an elementary school, she said.

“It is in people’s homes, it’s in their backyards,” Nickel said. “It is like looking at your killer.”

A 2023 joint investigation by the Missouri Independent, MuckRock, and The Associated Press, analyzing declassified government documents, demonstrated that the government downplayed and ignored the risks of St. Louis’ contamination for the better part of a century.

Though never recognized by the US government, Nickel and Chapman know first-hand the alarming rates of rare cancers and autoimmune diseases caused by exposure to those radioactive substances. “We always talk about the cancers, we don’t talk about the chronic illnesses, like lupus and MS [multiple sclerosis],” Nickel said. She has multiple autoimmune diseases, including lupus.

She described horror stories of birth defects as commonplace in their community: babies with no eyes, little girls born with ovarian cysts, and stillborn children.

Anecdotally, the most common cancer in the city’s contaminated areas is glioblastomas, an aggressive type of brain cancer. The state determined that certain zip codes in St. Louis—those now proposed for coverage under the RECA reauthorization bill—have an “almost 300 percent increase in childhood brain cancer,” Chapman said.

Nickel and Chapman have now been to Washington countless times to meet with voting members of Congress and advocate for the inclusion of St. Louis in RECA. Thanks in large part to their advocacy work, RECA reauthorization bill sponsored by senators Hawley and Luján adds a new section addressing exposure to nuclear waste related to the Manhattan Project, including from processing and enrichment plants. In total, the bill extends compensation to victims who lived in one of 21 zip codes in St. Louis for at least two years after 1949 and contracted a disease from a recognized list of illnesses. Brain cancer is included on that list; autoimmune diseases are not.

The RECA expansion bill aims to extend the application window by only another five years and caps funding at $50 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The reauthorization bill also doubles the list of states and window of time within which uranium miners had to have worked to qualify for compensation, raises the amount awarded to each category of claimant, and simplifies the application process.

“It is crucial that we get this passed in some form, even if it’s with the spending cap, and have something that we can then advocate to add others into and expand in the future,” Chapman said.

The human cost of nuclear security. Congress passed a GOP budget bill on Friday to avoid a government shutdown and fund the government through September. While the bill does not fund RECA’s reauthorization, it does earmark at least $21.7 billion for “defense nuclear nonproliferation” and “weapons activities” under the National Nuclear Security Administration for the next six months. Funding under these categories can be used for anything from continued domestic uranium enrichment to warhead modernization and assembly. These defense budget proposals come during an estimated $1.7 trillion, 30-year overhaul of the United States’ nuclear arsenal that will rebuild each leg of the nuclear triad and its accompanying infrastructure.

These investments were approved. Legislation to continue to compensate those poisoned by nuclear weapons activities were not.

“They’re investing all this money to build up our arsenal and develop new weapons. So when they say there’s not enough money to take care of the people those weapons have harmed in the past… I just think part of that cost has got to be taking care of the people they harm,” Dickson said.